Alexandra Korolkova & the Leksa Superfamily
October 22, 2009 at 12:19 PM
Александра Королькова - also known as Alexandra Korolkova - studied under ParaType’s Alexander Tarbeev and is now a type design and calligraphy instructor at various Moscow high schools. This week she brings us three very appealing typefaces as part of her MyFonts debut: Gorodets is a set of 60 hand-traced folk images from Russian woodcut art (specifically, the art of the town of Gorodets, near Nizhniy Novgorod on the Volga, about 400km east of Moscow), and is an excellent companion to many traditional European calligraphic scripts and perfect for wedding invitations and similarly formal projects when a bit of decoration is needed.
Her second and third releases are actually much more than just a single font; each is a full family in its own right: Leksa Sans, is a slightly-stressed humanist sans in a variety of weights (each with accompanying italics). It includes Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, small caps and alternates and bold weights that are excellent for display use. It was originally designed as a complement to Korolkova’s Leksa, an immensely readable oldstyle Roman bookface with metrics to match its sans counterpart; together, the two Leskas won the 2009 Modern Cyrillic award for best superfamily.